One of the reasons cooperative organizations lag behind corporate is their lackadaisical attitude towards professionalism. A case in point is NAFCUB which elected a new Board after a decade and yet after a week its official site nafcub.org announces H K Patil as the President and the old list of Directors are being displayed.
Though in ticker the website does announce names of new winners, clicking the same hardly illuminates you of anything. The website is bristling with photographs of Patil’s regime with little to show that in one of the most participatory elections an entire new Board with a new President have come into being.
A helpless Chief Executive Subhas Gupta told Indian Cooperative that the details have been forwarded to the concerned department. The pathetic situation is obvious in that it takes merely a few minutes to update a website. Lack of professionalism could be the only valid answer.
For NAFCUB the new Board has been constituted after nearly ten years. In 2004 in the last election, Vijay Kumar was elected as the President. His demise in 2009 saw the emergence of H K Patil but the election scheduled for 2010 got derailed at the behest of court orders. Patil continued till he was inducted in Karnataka Cabinet in 2013 paving way for Jagdish Mehta of Gujarat to take over.
Though an old-timer at NAFCUB Abhyankar would still need to clean up the mess and make the activities of NAFCUB more visible to the world. He has , Indian Cooperative has learnt, begun in the right earnest by calling a Meet the Press on Friday.
Insiders say there is continuity yet change at NAFCUB. Abhyankar has been with NAFCUB for past two decades yet he is no Patil. The difference between the two lies in their first calling. While Patil was first a politician Abhyankar is basically a cooperator from the Sisodia era.
Also though established in the year 1990 this is the first time the Chairmanship and Vice-Chairmanship has come to persons from Maharashtra.
But as NAFCUB President what matters most is one’s PR with the government and Reserve Bank of India where you have to fight the case of your member bodies every day. Insiders say that Abhyankar is as good at it as Patil since he had been at the various Committees that RBI formed from time to time. Abhyankar was also on the committee of Malagam Report constituted by the RBI for licensing of urban cooperative banks, they inform.
Efforts to contact Abhyankar to elicit his response on the new challenges have not succeeded as perhaps, he is pre-occupied meeting people post-election.